


Lacuna

by thisprettywren



Series: Silence is to sound [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Hiatus, M/M, Reichenbach Falls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-01
Updated: 2011-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-23 08:03:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisprettywren/pseuds/thisprettywren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He hides in plain sight, as all the best phantoms do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lacuna

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Cycle 3, Round 4 at [thegameison](thegameison-sh.livejournal.com). Prompt: Phantom Touch.

Sherlock Holmes dreams of ghosts.

Of course he does. Not of those who've died, but of the one who didn't, a name he can scarcely shape in the privacy of his own thoughts. He dreams the multiplicity of that face, its recursive expansion, layered and tenuous as slips of paper worn thin from handling. He folds them up so they fit in the quiet spaces of his brain, carries them with him when he goes; carries them when he carries nothing else but the clothes on his back. Their unexpected weight is its own reassurance, a constant pressure inside his skull.

The images unfold themselves silently in the dark and quiet spaces when he's waiting and can’t remember why. He sits on his borrowed bed and lets the pretence flow from his shoulders, slip along his spine. Sloughs it off until he feels skinned and hollow and alone, until it’s so quiet he can hear that stolen voice shaping another’s words.

Sherlock sends messages when he can, so disguised as to be meaningless apart from the fact of their existence. He has no way of knowing if they're ever received or understood.

Every time he passes an internet cafe or a call box he feels it, has to close himself off against the pull that draws him inward and back, because he can't go back. Not yet. Not while there's still no assurance that there's anything waiting for him (for them) but loss and sorrow. He loses the logic of it, forgets why this grief is better, but he clings to the knowledge that it is. Must be.

He slips in and out of crowds, hides in plain sight as all the best phantoms do: half-remembered relics inhabiting the spaces left by conscious thought.

He catches the shadows of his own image in the mirror: late at night or early in the morning, when he's just woken or when he hasn't slept in days, when the constructed persona crumbles around him. The ghost of his face in the mirror and the ghost of a laugh in his ear, a whispered rush of air against his skin, and what he wants

 _(Human flesh: impossible, fragile)_

is to go home, but first he has to ensure that he has a home to go to.

 

 

He's changed his clothes, his hair. His face, as much as he can, though that takes effort. At first, that is; until it doesn't, until the lines settle in his skin, crack through.

There's a scar on his hip, the remnant of a chunk of too-hot tile; an insinuation of pain in his flesh that he barely felt in the moment while the building burned around them. Indelible memory fading gradually from purple to red to white, framed by flesh growing inward around sharp peaks of bone. He can shape himself, remake his form, but this remains.

He's constantly shifting, even when the fever sets in and he doesn't move for months, thinks he might never move again. His body stalls in a hospital bed (he's deleted where; it matters less with each slow, cramped cycle of breath) and it's fitting, he thinks, that his transport has failed him, but still his thoughts never settle in the space around his restless body.

When he emerges again into open air it's cold. He pulls his hat low over his ears, draws himself down until his shoulders are hunched and narrow; it isn't all pretence. He looks old, alone, and he feels it, just as he feels the alignment of bones beneath his skin; longs for the contrapuntal force of military bearing at his side, the brush of calloused fingers against his cheek, throat, the back of his hand.

He aches to delete it, as though it were a thing of no importance, as though it weren't everything left to him of gravity, of himself. It's the only warm thing in his chest, the memory; he knows only that he cannot let it burn out. The work, his work. He'll sleep, he thinks, when it's done.

When he sights along the pistol it isn't his own hand he sees curled around its grip. It isn't his own

 _(oh, but it is, it is always, his)_

life he's saving.

When he sleeps he dreams of ghosts.


End file.
